no, brian,
another society will emerge out of art symposia at tate modern :)
of course there is no use in developping dichotomies like art and politics,
the abstract and the concrete, or formalism and contentism. in fact, that is
one problem (and at the same time the challenge) that i see in the term of
transversality: the danger of a separated discourse on possible FORMS of
cooperation while forgetting about the actual contents and contexts is as
problematic as the widespread practice of political activism debating the
content without reflecting about the organisational forms. so that is why
brian's attempts to concretize transversality in activist counterpower
contexts are very helpful. at the same time we have to repeat the question
that again sounds rather abstract: what is the difference of "free
cooperation", "open cultures" and "autonomous networks" in an emancipatory
and in a neoliberal discourse?
one way out of such ambivalencies is the strategy to invent new concepts
which make a difference for a short period (until empire swallows the
productive power of the multitude - and its practices and concepts - again).
out of deleuze's and guattari's factory of concepts transversality could be
helpful as one of many tools that help us grasp the difference in
organisation between postmodern businesses and the constituent practices of
european noborder-camps, sans papiers collectives or neo-zapatistas. by the
way, concerning some organisational forms of social fora and attac i am not
so sure if you can construct any difference at all. there brian's question
should be slightly transformed: How do they become socially subversive, UP
TO what scales?
g.
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Brian Holmes <brian.-*at*wanadoo.fr>;
An: <collabo-*at*topica.com>;
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 22. Oktober 2003 11:54
Betreff: Re: [freecooperation] transversality
| | Here's a first reflexion on autonomy and cooperation.
These remarks could directly follow on Jamie King's last
contribution, as well as Gerald's.
Gerald Raunig writes:
| | abstractly speaking the concept of transversality goes against both
vertical and horizontal structures. this is why i mentioned it here
in the actual context of organisational forms and especially forms
of "free" cooperation: as a tool in today's tricky situation where
activists find themselves not only opposing the rigid vertical
hierarchies of a state apparatus, but also the quasi horizontal
machine of globalized capitalism
|
I'm amazed by the formalism, Gerald. Abstractly speaking is right! Do
you really think we'll get another society out of 3-D graphics?
It just so happens I recently read Guattari's essays in Psychanalyse
et Transveralite (which I think are mostly translated in English in
some Guattari reader thing). What he talks about there is replacing
the irresolvable, Oedipal "transference" between doctor and patient
with a conscious manipulation of group dynamics. This is the basic
idea of institutional psychiatry: you can't cure the patient before
you transform the structures of repression in the ward, and the
hospital, and the village... all the way to the form of the state and
the economy, of course. But it starts with the roles that people are
occupying in daily life. There's a pretty interesting short text in
there, which was actually written for the bulletin of La Borde
clinic, called "Where does group psychotherapy begin?" He talks about
something they established, a "Basic Therapeutic Unit," which is like
an artificial family in a way (artificial, so without all the frozen
unconscious roles). It's small enough for people to have to respond,
and so it gives them a chance to develop what he calls "subjective
consistency." He says: "Suppose you're in a crowd, for example,
defending a barricade against the cops. If you don't know the people
you can always just split. If you're with your BTU, it's completely
different. Then it could have all kinds of consequences later: people
will say this or that.... Speech doesn't slip away. It's about
promises made, wagers met, transactions concluded.... With the BTU,
everybody's the psychoanalyst in turn.... Speech circulates in a
recognizable field, a finite but open field, which has, let's say, a
certain subjective consistency." The other concern that Guattari has,
throughout Psychanalyse et Transversalite, is how to move from a
subjected group to a subject-group, that is, an autonomous group, one
which can formulate a statement.
OK, I can just see everybody squirming and saying, "Oh fuck. The 70s
again! Get me outta here!" The point isn't some introspective,
what-did-I-do -when-I- was-little-to-become- such-a-jerk-today? kind
of thing. I don't even think they do that at La Borde either. The
point is to talk about activism and how it works. What I see in
reality, over the last few years, is a way for relatively small and
"consistent" groups to mesh temporarily into larger and pretty
chaotic formations, then dissolve back into their consistent groups.
In the 68 imaginary, these groups were supposed to form where you
worked, where you were socially bound together: so the notion of
"institutional psychiatry" was supposed to be generalizable, you were
supposed to start taking apart your work place, finding ways for the
janitors to speak with the delivery boys and the secretaries to team
up with the guys at the loading dock so they could all either face
off against the boss, or on the contrary, just forget the boss, do
something entirely different. But two things happened. One was lots
of failures, because the stuctures of organized workplaces proved
stronger than the subversive machines that people tried to put into
play. In parallel, and partially because of the dissatisfaction and
sabotage that went on during those fabled 70s, work itself has
mutated to the point where a lot of it no longer constitutes any kind
of group: isolated outsourcing is the rule, the business thinks it
can protect itself by becoming a coordinating hub at a distance from
any kind of slovenly employees association. What has emerged then are
volontary associations, which usually allow people to export some of
their skills and also their frustrations about how they make their
living into a free machine, really a free cooperation. How are these
free machines maintained? (Jamie posted some good links on
organisational tools that explain some of the ways.) How do they
become socially subversive, at what scales? How do they articulate
beyond the material, linguistic and cultural levels at which they can
have consistency?
These are the questions that Boris Buden, for instance, doesn't ask
in his essay which Gerald has also published on republicart,
ironically titled "Forever Young: Negri's Multitude as a
Post-emanciatory Concept of Emancipation"
(www.republicart.net/disc/empire/index.htm) It's a great article,
really worth reading. What Buden says there (drawing on my own work,
but against me!) is essentially that the subversion of authority,
which he identifies as one historical line of development of the
anticapitalist movement, cannot create political solidarity.
Therefore it cannot create a state that would run differently from
the existing states, and therefore it cannot create any real
emancipation. Well, his argument is strong, but I think he might be
wrong. What Buden doesn't realize is that Fanon, who is the hero in
his text against Negri, actually emerged as a psychiatrist from the
same place, Saint Alban, with the same teacher, Francois Tosquelles,
whose ideas institutional psychiatry gave Jean Oury the inspiration
to found La Borde, and thus launched Guattari's whole practice and
ultimately the idea of the multitudes, of the molecular revolution.
I think it may be possible to really create effective counterpowers
that could liberate us from some of the structurally devastating
effects of technoscience, which gives all us the ecological problems:
chemical pollution destroying the environment, inequality leading to
civil war, media pollution making any kind of democracy impossible.
As these things become life-or-death issues in the relatively short
term (and they are on two fronts: global civil war through
bomb-toting martyrs, collapse of democracy into fascism through mass
media manipulation; with environmental poisoning creeping up through
the ozone), it's possible to imagine that the networked paradigm - I
mean, the famous six degrees of separation, or the possibility for
anyone to communicate with anyone - could unleash political
formations other than a party seeking the creation of a state. The
thing is to achieve enough intermeshing to formulate powerful
statements - and then back them up with strikes, demonstrations and
so on. But for anyone who really wants to contribute to that, it's
pretty urgent to go much more deeply into actual transversality. Why
do people work together? How do they stay together? What kinds of
capillary effects does their concentrated group work have? How do
these effects cross over into other groups? It's great to quote the
demonstration of the migrants at Genoa, because that looks like the
perfect, stateless subject. But even more interesting is the
fantastically complex composition of different kinds of imperfect
microsolidarities, including Catholic charity groups and pitifully
reformist bourgeois lawyers and so forth, that made that
demonstration possible. In the same way (here's my ongoing debate
with Jamie King), it's great to decry the central committee of ATTAC
for being hegemonic and state-oriented and so on. But to look at the
way the social machine of ATTAC actually works, its split into local
committees dissenting from the central one and self-organizing, or to
look at the way the European Social Forum actually works, with all
the parallel events and attempts to knit together projects across the
cultural and national barriers - well, anyway, it's not so abstract,
and the "post-revolutionary subject" (quoting J.K.!!!) is not
immediately available without all the concrete practice, that's the
point.
best, Brian
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